Why this no-nukes bugaboo is anti-patriotic dreck
How Kathryn Bigelow went from unladylike interest in eroticized violence (Near Dark, Point Break, Blue Steel) to a fixation on the Pentagon (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) deserves future study, but one giveaway occurs in A House of Dynamite when the president of the United States finally responds to a nuclear bomb threat: “I listened to this podcast, and the guy said, ‘It’s like we all built a house filled with dynamite.’” Bigelow and her screenwriter Noah Oppenheim took that titular phrase from far-left guru Sam Harris and his Making Sense podcast. By not mentioning Harris by name, they make his presumed wisdom part of the film’s litany of borrowed political ideas.
The actors who spout crisis clichés throughout A House of Dynamite resemble a circus of puppets imitating public officials and military personnel in charge of monitoring and combating a surprise nuclear missile launch headed for the continental U.S. The largely British, mostly non-American cast does not represent the country the way Hollywood actors once did. (The POTUS barb that “So we just sit back and watch Chicago incinerate?” seems particularly ill-timed considering the current lawlessness there.) These generic bureaucratic faces seem vacant compared with those in Advise and Consent, Seven Days in May, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, and Thirteen Days — they are alien journeymen committed only to well-paid Hollywood liberalism rather than national ideals. They show Bigelow’s disregard for both essence and principles.
A House of Dynamite is not a work of realism. Bigelow’s style of headlong scenes, brief interactions, worried facial expressions, and a deluge of wonky acronyms simulates naturalism in place of actual governmental disclosure. As insider panic ensues — amid hectic protocol and self-questioning in the Situation Room, the press briefing room, Sea Based X-Band Radar Command, ad infinitum — the multiculti interplay resembles TV-commercial pseudo-diversity. It’s the fake realism of Paul Greengrass films (United 93, Captain Phillips, and the Bourne movies — all appalling) that impresses only gullible fans.
But it’s that phony political urgency in A House of Dynamite that is most insulting. Bigelow addresses the public as fools without any awareness of what public service looks like or how government works. The degree to which this is true — that our primary connection to government is through media — makes Bigelow’s emphasis on high-stress overdramatization particularly untrustworthy.
Falling back on the threat of nuclear warfare is a liberal Hollywood cliché, following George Clooney’s obsession with the blacklist of the 1950s and the dreadful Cold War drama Fail Safe — both easy distractions for Millennial progressives. Bigelow amps up nuclear dread as if the American people never suffered through 9/11, the tyranny of Covid vaccines, the lockdowns, the 2020 election, the illegal-immigrant invasion, the Chinese spy balloon, repetitive impeachment prosecutions, or the depleted oil reserves.
What world does Bigelow live in that she doesn’t understand the current distrust in political officials whose ideological agendas overcome their duties? Bigelow betrays her audience through a three-part structure (“Inclination Is Flattening,” “Hitting a Bullet with a Bullet,” and “A House Filled with Dynamite”) written by Oppenheim, who was formerly the president of NBC News. The setup both replays and cheats the narrative. This deception is most obvious with the first Situation Room sequence, in which the only projected POTUS image is blank, but we hear a foul-mouthed, crude, quick-to-anger, Biden-like voice. Later, in some kind of screwy partisan face-saving, black British actor Idris Elba is revealed as the POTUS. The scene hinges on an exchange where POTUS exclaims “This is insanity!” and is corrected. “No, sir. This is reality!”
Bigelow disgraces reality, as she also disgraces patriotism. A House of Dynamite pushes us so far beyond the pacifism of the nuclear bomb and Vietnam eras that she also disgraces the idea of national loyalty. Critic Dennis Delrogh noted how Robert Aldrich’s 1977 nuclear-threat thriller Twilight’s Last Gleaming preserved patriotism. Relevant to a recently dark regime, it also bravely exposed the conflict of political and military secrets. (“This country is great enough to survive the truth. This may be the last chance to trust our people,” said a rogue general played by Burt Lancaster, of Hollywood’s old liberal school.)
In Bigelow’s Millennial liberalism, the socialist fervor and self-contempt that followed 9/11 have turned the country away from Aldrich’s vision and into a paranoid security state with a longing for annihilation. Bigelow’s no-nukes bugaboo distracts from moral consideration. That’s why she and Oppenheim rely on Sam Harris (small minds think alike). They eventually propose that POTUS can choose only “surrender or suicide.” That’s not patriotic; Bigelow gives us only a war hawk’s ultimatum.
